Recovering Journalist blogger Mark Potts today pans the NYT Co. for "wimp[ing] out" in the face of GateHouse Media's lawsuit--and, in the processes, advances the widespread notion that GateHouse's suit was unjustifiable:

[I]n waging an old-fashioned kind of newspaper war, GateHouse brought an antique blunderbuss to bear on a fight over a high-tech mosquito

According to one school of thought, GateHouse's decision to challenge Boston.com's "Your Town" approach in court merits utter contempt. As a commenter on Universal Hub said: "This is a clear case of a bunch of morons who skipped that "Internet 101" class in business school, and now they're pissed because people aren't going through their website the way THEY want them to."

About that Boston newspaper war I mentioned a couple days ago? Between GateHouse and the Globe?

Well, it just got a whole lot nastier.

As Dan Kennedy notes, there's a very important issue at play here:

Since Boston.com is selling advertising on its "Your Town" pages, the argument is that the New York Times Co., which owns Boston.

What interests me most about this article isn't that Boston.com's street-cleaning alert system isn't working well for Somerville. It's that GateHouse--which publishes the Somerville Journal and the related site Wicked Local Somerville--is gleefully using failure to jab at Boston.com and the Globe.

Yesterday at Media Nation, my friend and former colleague Dan Kennedy argued that the Beverly Citizen erred in posting video footage of the Beverly Horribles parade, which contained some pretty off-color references to the ongoing Gloucester teen-pregnancy story. (By "pretty off-color references," I mean, among other things, a giant squirting penis and signs reading "G.